The present invention relates to user data verification. In specific embodiments, the invention relates to verification of a user's current employment, a user's current educational status, or the like.
Potential financial risk takers (risk takers) often desire to verify representations made by a user, before taking a financial risk on behalf of the user. As an example, many risk takes desire to verify a user's employment and/or cash flow to determine whether the user is likely to satisfy the user's obligations to the risk taker. The verification (or validation) may be desirable for a variety of purposes, such as for payday loans, installment loans, revolving credit such as credit cards, auto loans, leases, rentals of property, loans secured by real property, loans secured by personal property, insurance arrangements, vendors that grant credit such as phone companies and utilities, financial transactions, employment, check cashing, and the like.
In addition to employment verification (e.g. validation), users might have other characteristics that can be verified by the risk taker to help them determine whether to take the risk on behalf of the user, i.e. income verification. Some of the other characteristics that may be verified may include the user's current compensation, length of employment at the employer, past employment history, stability of employment (e.g. has the user changed jobs frequently), “depth of relationships” at their employer (e.g. number of contacts with other employees of the company), educational history, current educational status, and the like.
The inventor is currently aware of, several common methods to verify employment of a user. One common technique has been a risk-taker (or an agent of the risk taker) directly calling the Human Resource Department (or user's superior) of a company, organization, or the like to verify the user's employment. One drawback to such an approach is that the size of the transaction may not justify the cost of contacting the purported employer. The fully weighted cost of such a phone call (including potential “phone tag”) is believed to be around $5-$20. Another drawback to such an approach is that it is often difficult for one to locate the appropriate Human Resource Department or to locate the user's superior. Another drawback is that the user might give out a friend's or a contact's name and number, who then poses as an HR Resources Department or superior. That person may then give the risk taker/caller false information that could induce the risk taker into granting the user credit. Yet another drawback is the delay in the time it takes to confirm employment by calling. For example an employer might not be open 24 hour per day, 7 days per week for employment verification purposes. Further as it can be imagined, to an employer, the verification of employment of a current or former employee is typically a low priority matter, and some employers may take days before responding to a request. Another drawback is that these types of verifications can be embarrassing to the employee, i.e. an invasion of privacy.
Another technique has been the use of a contributory data model. In such a model, third party employment verification service providers (i.e. fee-based, TALX) review submitted user names against a database of employment records. To enable this service, the service providers are typically granted specific access to different companies' employment record databases, or the like. One drawback to such an approach is that coverage of small to medium-sized employers, governments, and the like is very limited. In other words, such third party verification services typically only contract with large companies. It would not be worth the verification service's time to set up a relationships with the millions of small to medium-sized employers and to have them contribute their employment records into the shared database. This is especially believed to be true because of the small demand and small number of queries for the records of those small to medium-sized employers. Another drawback to such an approach is that such services are expensive, as they require significant infrastructure and on-going relationship management. Additional drawbacks are the amount of money charged by the third party employment verification service providers is material (between $5 and $20 per lookup in some cases); the databases are often out of date (e.g. >one month old); and that all large employers do not participate in such systems.
In light of the above, what is desired are ways to verify user representations of data on applications or the like without the drawbacks described above.